A new era of public safety in Dallas is here, albeit marked by a breakup. The University of Texas at San Antonio, which helped create and steer the police department’s acclaimed strategies to reduce violent crime over the last five years, will end its partnership with the city in August. “They broke up with us, that plain and simple,” Chief Daniel Comeaux told the City Council’s Public Safety Committee in May.
But in the words of UT San Antonio criminologist Mike Smith, that was always the plan.
“The goal is not for us to continue to work with these agencies forever,” says the professor who has worked on the violence reduction approach since its 2021 inception. “They’re better positioned than any other department in the country to do this work on their own.”
Violent crime in Dallas is trending down for a sixth consecutive year, distancing the city from the deadly spikes of 2019 and 2020. The department ended 2025 with 143 murders — the fewest in Dallas since the 136 recorded in 2015, and down more than 100 since the two-decade high of 256 in 2020.
The first half of this year has followed a similar trajectory, although the murder tally has tracked close to 2025 levels. Police reported 79 murders through Monday, one fewer than this point last year. There have been 2,912 aggravated assaults, 113 fewer than in 2025. Department data show 943 robberies, down about 19%, or 219 fewer, compared to this point last year.
City Hall has credited this trend to the violent crime plan, which uses granular data to direct police and public resources to the parts of town where violence is most common. Smith says the plan he helped craft remains a “good news story,” but he’s quick to point out that Dallas is not unique.
For a second year in a row, the U.S. appears to be headed toward its lowest murder count since the FBI began tracking in 1960. What exactly is fueling the nation’s crime drop will be studied for years to come, and researchers are careful not to chalk it up to a single cause. But there’s no question federal COVID-19 relief funding that will expire later this year helped public officials implement programs they later credited with these sustained declines.
Indianapolis committed around $150 million of its federal recovery money to scale up its crime reduction strategy and hire local groups to provide job training and counseling to those at highest risk of violence. Baltimore funneled $50 million into a community safety office, which outsourced grants and contracts to violence interruption groups. Philadelphia allocated more than $25 million to gun violence prevention programs.
Dallas did things differently. Unlike other big cities, it did not lean on temporary dollars from the feds to stand up its broader public safety initiatives. The city created the Office of Integrated Public Safety Solutions in April 2020 to brainstorm solutions to crime that went beyond policing. Now called the Office of Emergency Management and Crisis Response, the department is made up of 56 civilian staffers who focus on quality-of-life issues, homelessness, behavioral health, and emergency operations.
Those positions were budgeted in the city’s general fund — paid for with local tax dollars instead of temporary pandemic relief, says Kevin Oden, the office’s director. He says Dallas had already launched alternatives to traditional policing before the COVID money started flowing, which somewhat insulated the city from the financial pressures now facing other local governments as the funding expires.
A civilian “strike team,” for instance, remediates blight by making public improvements in neighborhoods where crime is prevalent. Nationwide research has shown that such strategies — from adding street lighting to clearing urban decay — can improve public safety for a relatively low cost without pulling police officers away from their work. Dallas instead spent the federal money on one-time public safety enhancements, like street lights and Chevy Tahoes for the RIGHT Care program, which sends a paramedic and a clinical social worker to respond to emergency mental health calls with a police officer, Oden says.
Oden feels his team’s philosophy is now woven into Dallas’ fabric, even with steep budget cuts expected at City Hall later this year.
“We’re never gonna have all the resources for all the needs in the city,” says Andrew Rollo, who leads the three-person City Action Strike Team’s remediation efforts. “We’re gonna do what we can, where we can, with what we have.”
The city has had to make difficult decisions with some of its partners. Dallas CRED, a violence interrupter group created with city grant funding and later supported by philanthropic organizations, shut down in 2025, two years after losing its public money.
The state of Texas later awarded the city of Dallas a piece of its new $2 million initiative to support community violence intervention. Advocates hailed the bipartisan investment as critical amid federal cuts that were used to pay for such programs. The city endowed the $300,000 grant to the youth advocacy organization Lone Star Justice Alliance. Its CEO, Elizabeth Henneke, says the funding shows state lawmakers are paying attention to the role community-based efforts play in improving public safety.
“There’s not enough money going to this, given how successful it has proven to be,” she says. “I hope this is the first of many investments the city will make, not just to LSJA but to our partners.”
Henneke plans to bring together community groups and expand the HYPE Center, a gathering place near Deep Ellum that provides resources for people between 18 to 24 identified as most at risk of violence. Those include counseling, career planning, techniques to de-escalate conflict, and food and housing stability. Her team hopes to expand the program to kids as young as 12 through new local partnerships.
“Our young people are not problems to be fixed; they’re opportunities to lift up, and so our approach is inherently strengths-based,” Henneke says. “Ideally, we go from each of us serving 100 people per year to collectively serving thousands.”
But of the city’s various approaches to this issue, the strategies created with UT San Antonio to address violence have attracted the most attention. “We really have found the secret sauce,” Council member Kathy Stewart said of the program at last month’s Public Safety Committee meeting.
The plan acknowledges that most violent crime happens in tiny geographies across the city. It identifies these locations to help police determine where and when they need to increase their visibility. The “hot spots,” each about the size of a football field, change every 60 days based on the data. The academics also authored reports evaluating the plan’s impact, and designed forms to document quality-of-life changes at Dallas’ most crime-ridden apartments, such as Volara in east Oak Cliff, which has cycled on and off the police department’s radar.
“These are very, very challenged places,” Smith says. “Dallas is doing a better job than any city I know of trying to deal with these problems, and it’s a long-term commitment.”
The plan’s longest-term strategy is called “focused deterrence,” which involves contacting formerly incarcerated people who are determined to be at the highest risk of committing another crime. This is now in full swing, Smith says. As of June, police officials told the City Council that they’ve engaged 191 people, 99 of whom are current clients. Those individuals are connected to resources like job placement and training, housing, meals, and healthcare — and warned of the punitive consequences should they re-offend.
Smith and his team are now training the police department on what had been their role the last five years. “I’m very confident that they can do this work on their own,” Smith says.
The researchers will soon shift their attention to Fort Worth, where its police department — now led by former Dallas Police Chief Eddie García, who worked with Smith to build the violent crime plan — contracted with UT San Antonio for a similar strategy.
The Dallas Police Department declined an interview request about its future plans, instead referring to public statements its officials made at City Council Public Safety Committee meetings. Comeaux told the committee in May the department was “looking at a couple other institutions” locally to help police with the plan’s data analyses. “The data is unchanged and violent crime in Dallas is continuing to decrease,” Allison Hudson, a police spokeswoman, wrote in an email to The Lab Report. “We don’t have anything else to add at this time.”
Despite the city’s gains, police data reveal where improvements are still needed. A Child Poverty Action Lab analysis shows the small areas that accounted for a disproportionate amount of the city’s violence in the first half of 2026. (The Lab Report is a local journalism project published by CPAL. Our newsroom operates with editorial independence.)
Ten half-mile grids — about 0.7% of the city — accounted for around 8% of Dallas’ “street-level” violence, according to the CPAL analysis. “Street-level” violence includes homicides, aggravated assaults, and robberies, but not family violence and sex crimes, which typically occur inside homes.
Most grids didn’t see any violence: Of 1,583 half-mile squares across the city of Dallas, 925 — 58% — didn’t report a single such offense through June. One of the most violent half-miles included the Greenville Avenue and Park Lane intersection in North Dallas, less than a mile east of NorthPark Center across Central Expressway.
On a recent July morning, cars roared past two gas stations, a Jack-in-the-Box, and multicultural grocers adjacent to the intersection. Just past the commercial strip, at least seven people rested under trees along Shady Brook Lane, not far from a DART bus station. Others carried grocery bags by a sprawling apartment complex across the road.
Police tallied eight robberies and seven aggravated assaults in this area in 2026. That’s seven fewer violent crimes than at the mid-point of 2025, but still about 11 times above the citywide average.
An area in east Oak Cliff shows a similar trend. A half-mile grid that encompasses Bonnie View Road and Highland Hills Drive includes the Estelle Village Apartments, a small wooded area, and about a dozen one-story homes. On a recent afternoon, a police officer watched the front of the complex from a parked squad car while another cop drove his cruiser in a loop around the property. The neighborhood was quiet, save for a teenager who strolled down a sidewalk and two young adults who filmed themselves dancing.
Although less trafficked than the North Dallas location, police reported 11 aggravated assaults and two robberies here in 2026 — five of which occurred at night inside the fenced complex, according to the analysis. That’s down from 25 violent crimes last year.
Addressing the problems can feel like Whac-a-Mole. As grids fall off the list, new ones emerge. The half-mile around Wycliff Avenue and Cedar Springs Road in Oak Lawn, for instance, reported 10 violent crimes in 2026, eight more than last year. The neighborhood, which includes a strip of popular bars and adjoining residential streets, logged five robberies, four aggravated assaults, and a murder this year. Nine of the 10 occurred between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m.
These trends help inform the police response. Solutions look different. What’s needed for forested Highland Hills in east Oak Cliff differs from the high-trafficked, commercial corridor not far from NorthPark or the neighborhood near The Strip on Cedar Springs. A small grid might need mentors to steer kids to activities and school. Others could benefit from better lighting, trimmed weeds, and fixed gates. Police might need to be present around the clock to disrupt gangs and drug sales at an apartment complex or motel. Some need all of this.
The criminologists who helped implement Dallas’ violence reduction strategies over the last five years say the new guard is equipped to continue the work without them. But Smith urges leaders to not lose focus; a city that has experienced sustained success might be tempted to allow other priorities to intrude.
“Whether your crime plan advisors or your research partners are moving on or not, don’t take your eye off the ball,” Smith says. “Violent crime continues to be the largest single destructive kind of crime that any city deals with, and even as it’s falling nationally, if you think it’s just going to keep going on its own forever, think again. It won’t.”
Kelli Smith is a staff writer for The Lab Report. kelli@labreportdallas.com.